So this is a comparison by job, not a countdown. Eight apps, all alive and still on the stores as of July 2026, all checked against their current listings and pricing rather than what a 2022 blog post said about them. Warnely is one of the eight – we make it, and we have tried to describe it with exactly the same detachment as the rest.
The four jobs a "safety app" can do
Awareness is knowing what is happening in the place you are in, or the place you are going. Government advisories, incident alerts, neighbourhood risk scores. Smart Traveler, Sitata, GeoSure, and Warnely live here.
Summoning help is the panic-button category: press something, and either a monitoring centre or your own contacts respond. Noonlight and bSafe live here, and the difference between those two – who actually answers – matters more than any other detail in this post.
Being findable is passive location sharing with people who care where you are. Life360 owns this category, though Find My and WhatsApp live location cover a surprising amount of it for free.
Reference is the boring layer: which number summons an ambulance in Laos, where the nearest consulate is. TripWhistle and Smart Traveler both carry some of this.
No single app does all four. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of them.
The comparison
| App | What it does | Alert speed | Coverage | Price | Platforms | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Warnely | Real-time incident wire from around 50 feeds, FCDO + US State advisory tracking, 180 country guides | Minutes | Global | Free; premium £4.99/mo | iOS | | Smart Traveler | Official US State Dept advisories, embassy contacts, STEP enrolment | Days to weeks | ~200 countries | Free | iOS, Android | | GeoSure | Neighbourhood safety scores, 1–100, across six categories | Scores rather than alerts; advisory notifications added in 2026 | 850,000+ locations, 200+ countries | Free tier; subscriptions to $9.99/mo | iOS, Android | | Sitata | Itinerary-based disruption alerts: outbreaks, strikes, unrest, flight problems | Minutes to hours | Global | Free app; paid travel-protection plans | iOS, Android | | Life360 | Family location circles, place alerts, crash detection, SOS | Real-time location | Sharing works globally; many paid extras are US-only | Free tier; paid $7.99–$24.99/mo | iOS, Android | | Noonlight | Silent panic button with monitored 911 dispatch | Immediate | US only | Free button; $4.99–$9.99/mo add-ons | iOS, Android | | bSafe | SOS to personal guardians with live audio/video, voice activation, fake call | Immediate, to your contacts | Anywhere you and they have signal | $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr | iOS, Android | | TripWhistle | Local emergency numbers for 196 countries, one-tap dialling | n/a – reference tool | 196 countries | Free | iOS |
Prices are the app-store figures at the time of writing; regional pricing varies.
App by app
Warnely
Ours, so the plain version. Warnely watches around 50 incident feeds – news wires, USGS earthquakes, GDACS, flood warnings, health sources – and pushes city-level alerts within minutes of an incident surfacing. It tracks every FCDO and US State Department advisory change on a running changes feed, and carries guides for 180 countries with a composite risk score. Free on iOS; the premium tier (£4.99 a month) adds advisory-change push for saved countries and the deeper editorial content.
What it does not do: there is no Android app yet, no panic button, and no location-sharing circles. The wire also skews towards incidents big enough to reach news and official feeds – it will tell you about the earthquake and the coup, not the dodgy street two blocks from your hotel.
Smart Traveler (US State Department)
The official app for State Department advisories, embassy locations, and STEP enrolment. Free, official, and the advisory content itself is genuinely good. The app around it is neglected – the last listed update shipped in September 2023. US citizens should enrol in STEP regardless; the app is a thin wrapper on advice you can also get by email. Non-Americans get the advisories but none of the consular machinery.
GeoSure
The only app here that scores at neighbourhood level rather than country level. Every district gets a 1–100 rating across six categories – overall, women's safety, LGBTQ+ safety, physical harm, health and medical, political freedoms – across more than 850,000 locations. The 2026 release added an AI assistant and advisory notifications. The scores are the product: useful for choosing where to book a hotel, less useful once something is actually happening. The free tier is capped; full access runs to $9.99 a month.
Sitata
The closest competitor to Warnely on the awareness job, and a fair one. Sitata monitors disease outbreaks, transit strikes, unrest, and flight disruption against your specific itinerary, on both platforms. The company has steadily folded the app into its travel-insurance business, so the richest features – emergency chat assistance, medical connections – now sit inside paid protection plans priced per trip. If you want alerts on Android today, this is the strongest option.
Life360
Not a travel app, which is precisely why it works. Life360 does continuous location circles for families, place alerts, an SOS button, and crash detection, and the free tier covers the parts that matter abroad. Paid tiers (Silver at $7.99, Gold at $14.99, Platinum at $24.99 a month in the US) add emergency dispatch, roadside assistance, and identity protection – much of which is US-only, so read the fine print before paying for a trip to Vietnam. For a family split across a city, or parents tracking a gap-year route, nothing else is as reliable.
Noonlight
The best panic button in the business, and it does not work outside the United States. Hold the button; release it and enter your PIN if all is well; fail to enter the PIN and a monitoring centre dispatches emergency services to your GPS location, silently. The button is free, with $4.99 and $9.99 monthly tiers adding integrations and crash response. For solo travellers within the US – rideshares, dates, night walks – it is excellent. Board an international flight and it becomes a dead icon on your home screen.
bSafe
The panic button that does work abroad, with a structural caveat: bSafe alerts your chosen guardians, not the police. An SOS – voice-activated if you set it up – streams live audio and video to your contacts with your location; there is a fake-call feature and a Follow Me live trace. The catch is that your guardian in Manchester then has to work out how to raise emergency services in Marrakech. Reviews run mediocre (3.4 stars on the App Store), with recurring complaints about location accuracy and the paywall: $4.99 a month, nearly everything gated.
TripWhistle
A free iOS utility that knows the police, fire, and ambulance numbers for 196 countries, dials them in one tap, and shows your GPS coordinates to read out. It has barely been updated in years, but emergency numbers do not rot quickly. Worth the download weight; also worth knowing that 112 reaches emergency services across the whole EU and redirects correctly in dozens of countries beyond it.
The verdict: match the app to the job
- Family location sharing – Life360, free tier first, and only pay up after checking which extras work in your destination.
- A panic button inside the US – Noonlight, no contest. It is free and the dispatch model is the real thing.
- A panic button anywhere else – there isn't a good one. bSafe is the closest, if your guardians understand their role. Otherwise: live location sharing plus the local emergency number gets you most of the way.
- Choosing which neighbourhood to stay in – GeoSure, on either platform.
- Advisory push and incident awareness – Warnely on iPhone; Sitata if you are on Android or want the insurance bundle. Either way, we would say read the advisories from both governments rather than one – the FCDO and State disagree about a third of the time, and the disagreements are informative.
- US citizens, always – Smart Traveler or the STEP website, whatever else you install.
- The reference layer – TripWhistle, or simply memorise 112.
Two or three apps from different rows beat any single app. The awareness layer tells you something is happening and the location layer means someone knows where you are; the reference layer is how you actually summon local help. They do not substitute for each other.
FAQ
Do panic-button apps work abroad?
Mostly no. Noonlight's monitored dispatch works in all 50 US states and nowhere else. bSafe works anywhere, but it alerts your personal contacts rather than emergency services, so someone in your circle still has to make the local call. In the EU, 112 from any phone remains the most dependable panic button ever shipped.
Is there a UK equivalent of the Smart Traveler app?
No. The FCDO publishes its travel advice on gov.uk with per-country email alerts, but no app. Warnely tracks every FCDO advisory change and can push them to your phone, which is the nearest thing currently available; the raw email alerts are free and worth having either way.
Are travel safety apps free?
The useful cores mostly are. Noonlight's button, Life360's circles, Smart Traveler, TripWhistle, and Warnely's incident wire all cost nothing. The pattern across the category is consistent: monitoring is free, and you pay for dispatch, depth, or insurance on top.
Do I need more than one?
Yes, because the categories genuinely do not overlap. One awareness app, one location-sharing arrangement, and the local emergency number covers the sensible baseline. Past three apps you are managing notifications rather than risk.